Apple Announces The M1 Pro / M1 Max, Asahi Linux Starts Eyeing Their Bring-Up

[mppix]

I think it's relevant. Of course, ISA alone won't make or break, but no factory or package will fix a bloated ISA.

Among other things, we can thank benchmarks for showing/highlighting the importance of AVX512.

.. and now we have a SoC running on basic instructions and leveraging, in large part, the iGPU for compute.

Interesting times..

[sinepgib]

Seriously? Have you not heard of Chromebooks??

Seriously? Have you not heard of ChromeOS?? They don't run Android.

[sdack]

Insults are the sincerest form of concession. I was almost impressed you'd gone so long without lashing out at me.

It was not an insult, but a compliment. I have called you funny. That you again go off on a tangent is all you. And all you want is to be loved, just like Baby Stewie.

If you do not want to be funny or like Baby Stewie then how can we help you?

[coder]

There's been a huge number of complaints about just how fragile and flimsy Apple products have been, especially their Macbooks.

A quick google tells me the cheapest Macbook is $999.99 dollars

I'm not sure what's your point. I think we all know Apple's prices are inflated relative to what someone could charge, for the same hardware. You're paying a premium price for the software, the logo, and the privilege of calling yourself a Mac user. Call it the "Apple tax", if you like.

I can buy the self assembly i5-1135g7 framework for $749 dollars and it's upgradeable, no soldered ram or SSD. This is a geek website after all so a reasonable amount of technical expertise is to be expected here, it's also very easy to repair.

If you're trying to make the case for modular and upgradable hardware, it's not fair to use Apple as the baseline. To be fair, all of the systems should include a MS Windows license or else compare those with no OS license at all.

Speaking of flimsy and fragility......

You can cherry-pick non-upgradable systems that are less well-made. That doesn't speak to the average case.

[coder]

Seriously? Have you not heard of ChromeOS?? They don't run Android.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, here. Of what relevance is that distinction to the original post? They're both Google-developed, Linux-based operating systems that can run Android apps and support ARM CPUs.

[Slartifartblast]

If you're trying to make the case for modular and upgradable hardware, it's not fair to use Apple as the baseline. To be fair, all of the systems should include a MS Windows license or else compare those with no OS license at all.

This is a website dedicated to Linux & it's associated hardware so why do I need to pay for something I don't need ? I don't need the price of a meal for a 1 hour flight adding to my ticket and locked in to paying for it, I don't want it ? It's perfectly fair to compare what you can get without an OS to what you can with and you can cut your cloth accordingly, it's called a balanced buying decision based on ones needs.

Windows Ten(now Eleven)forums and Macrumors that way........

[coder]

This is a website dedicated to Linux & it's associated hardware so why do I need to pay for something I don't need ?

Right, that's why I suggested that you could compare machines without an OS license, assuming you can find enough examples. However, because I'm not sure how many examples of that there'd be, I figured it'd be easiest to compare machines that included a Windows license.

I'm surprise I have to actually explain this, but if the purpose of your comparison is to establish the differential in price & quality, then you need a common baseline. Without knowing exactly how much the manufacturer paid for an included OS license, we can't account for its contribution to the total. With an unknown cost in the mix, any attempted price comparisons would be thrown off, such as in the case of your Mac example.

The suggestion isn't that you would personally buy a machine with a Windows license.

It's perfectly fair to compare what you can get without an OS to what you can with and you can cut your cloth accordingly, it's called a balanced buying decision based on ones needs.

Sure, if you're making an individual purchasing decision. However, when you're arguing about the relative merits of two different hardware approaches, the unknown contribution of the OS license gets in the way.

Windows Ten(now Eleven)forums and Macrumors that way........

Please, don't be obtuse.

[Slartifartblast]

Right.

I stopped reading after that.

[coder]

I stopped reading after that.

Cool story bro.

[coder]

For anyone not following the recent SiFive/RISC-V thread, you'll have missed where I posted this fairly succinct summary that lists some of their instruction fusion & elimination tricks used by Apple's Firestorm cores, as well as various detailed specifications:

• https://dougallj.github.io/applecpu/firestorm.html

Here's Maynard Handley's comprehensive 350-page compilation of what's known about the M1. He sometimes comments on realworldtech & anandtech as name99, where I'd seen many of his posts. To gain a proper appreciation of Apple achievement, it'd be worth spending some time with it:

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WrM...L_bjuJSPt/view

Just today, Anandtech posted a performance review of the M1 Max. Included are benchmarks against Intel's i9-11980HK (45 W, 8-core Tiger Lake) and AMD's Ryzen 5950HS (35W 8-core Zen 3). Take care not to miss the multithreaded benchmarks. Guess who gets absolutely spanked?

• https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024...ormance-review

From the conclusion:

...with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn’t expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve.

...this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren’t even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.

I get that a lot of people don't like Apple. Heck, I don't like Apple, to the extent that I wouldn't even take one of these machines for free! Still, if you don't find these developments exciting, I ask that you kindly turn in your Geek card to the next available representative.